1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telecommunications equipment, and, in particular, to enclosures for housing and protecting telecommunications equipment.
2. Description of the Related Art
A building entrance protector (BEP) is an enclosure used to house and protect telecommunications equipment. For example, a BEP may house the components used to interface between a multi-wire cable providing telephone service to a building and the twisted pairs of copper wire for individual telephones distributed throughout the building. These interface components may include splicing connectors used to break out pairs of wires from a multi-wire cable, as well as electrical isolation interface components, such as protector panels used to receive high-voltage/high-current plug-in protectors, and connectors, such as insulation displacement connectors (IDCs), used to terminate twisted pairs from individual telephones. The BEP may have two or more hinged pieces that define one or more different compartments within the BEP for such functions as breaking out twisted pairs of wires from the multi-wire cable, connecting the twisted pairs to electrical isolation components, connecting the electrical isolation components to IDC connectors, and terminating the twisted pairs at the IDC connectors.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional building entrance protector 10 configured with two removable wiring troughs 72 that assist in the organization and bundling of wiring 30 terminated at BEP 10. FIG. 2 shows a perspective view of one of wiring troughs 72 of FIG. 1. Wiring troughs 72 are designed with an opening 80 large enough accommodate the maximum amount of wiring expected to be terminated at BEP 10. For buildings having a relatively large number of telephones and/or other telecommunications equipment, it has become common practice to stack two or more BEI's, like BEP 10 of FIG. 1, end to end on a wall one on top of the other to efficiently utilize what may be a limited amount of mounting area designated for such purposes. In these cases, it may be desirable to route additional wiring from one or more other BEPs through the wiring trough of a particular BEP. In such applications, the amount of wiring that a wiring trough needs to accommodate may be greater than the maximum amount of wiring that can be accommodated by wiring troughs 72.
Simply making the wiring trough larger so that it can accommodate more wiring has the disadvantage of decreasing the ability of that wiring trough to effectively control the bundling of wires when relatively small amounts of wiring are used. Moreover, when there are small amounts of wiring, using large wiring troughs wastes wall mounting space.
Another approach is to provide a number of differently sized wiring troughs for different situations, but this is not an attractive solution. First of all, it requires maintaining a supply of different types of wiring troughs. It is also difficult and inconvenient to have to replace a relatively small wiring trough with a relatively large wiring trough for an existing BEP when the amount of wiring increases (e.g., as more telephones and/or more adjacent BEPs are added to a configuration).